Jeff Sauro • January 31, 2012
An analysis of SUPR-Q data from users of popular social networking sites reveals users generally don't trust social networks. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ all fall within the bottom quintile of website trust. Facebook leads the pack with the highest Net Promoter Score and usability.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • January 24, 2012
The distinction between a qualitative study and quantitative study is a false dichotomy. It doesn't cost more money to quantify or use statistics. It just takes some training and confidence. Not only can qualitative data be categorized into quantities, but it can prompt further questions and discovery for usability improvement.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • January 17, 2012
There are advantages and disadvantages to the different usability testing methods: lab-based, remote moderated and remote unmoderated. A combination of methods provides a more comprehensive picture of the user experience but is not always possible. Consider these nine factors when deciding on a method.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • January 10, 2012
Despite UX being a field with wide ranging skills, the average salaries for individual contributors are about the same across job functions at about $85k and haven't changed much over two years.[Read More]
Guest Post By Jim Lewis • January 3, 2012
System Usability Scale (SUS) scores are often collected along with Net Promoter Scores in evaluations of software and website usability. An examination of 81 datasets from 2200 users shows that dividing SUS scores by 10 does a decent job of predicting the Net Promoter Score.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • December 27, 2011
Thank you to the 585k visitors and 1.3 Million page views on MeasuringUsability.com in 2011. Of the 52 articles written in 2011, in ascending order, here are the 15 most popular.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • December 20, 2011
Improving the user experience means starting with the right measure or measures to manage. Here are 10 of the more common ones I've written about in 2011.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • December 14, 2011
The only thing worse than users failing a task is users failing a task and thinking they've completed it successfully. This is a disaster. Disasters can be tracked by measuring task completion rates and task-level confidence. Data from 174 tasks show the likely prevalence of disasters in consumer software and websites.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • December 7, 2011
What sample size do i need? It's usually the first and most difficult question to answer when planning a usability evaluation. There are actually good ways for estimating the sample size that don't rely on intuition, dogma or conventions.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • November 30, 2011
There isn't a usability thermometer to tell you how usable your software or website is. Instead we rely on the impact of good and bad usability to assess the quality of the user experience. Assessing that impact starts by knowing and collecting these 10 metrics.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • November 22, 2011
The reported number of UX professionals in both small and large organizations has increased between 20% and 30% over the last two years. This can be attributed to both an increase in actual UX professionals and a broadening of the jobs that fall under the UX umbrella.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • November 15, 2011
For as long as there have been websites it seems that there's been a call to reduce the number of clicks to improve the user experience. An analysis of click counts and task times across 3 eCommerce website usability tests and 1200 users found that clicks and time have a correlation of .5. Clicks predict around 25% of task time, meaning it's better to directly measure or estimate task times than click counts when improving website efficiency.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • November 8, 2011
There are many great methods for gathering insights from users and many more software tools. Here are the tools and services I use when conducting user research.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • November 1, 2011
A product must be useful and usable to be adopted and both have been shown to predict reported usage. However, perceived usefulness is 1.5 times more important than usability when predicting technology acceptance.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • October 26, 2011
Build it and they might come. Build trust and they will stay. Make it usable and credible and they may tell their friends. Measuring credibility and trust along with usability should be part of benchmarking efforts. Is your website trusted as little as Facebook or as much as PayPal and Apple?[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • October 19, 2011
Good website navigation is essential for task success. When users' first click is down an incorrect path, only 46% eventually succeed. Here are some ideas on testing first click success.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • October 11, 2011
Recent changes in Netflix pricing, services and poor communication substantially affected key customer metrics. A longitudinal analysis of customers shows a drop of 80 percentage points in the Net Promoter Score and a drop in credibility rankings from the 99th percentile to the 62nd percentile. What's bad for Netflix is a reminder to measure early and often.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • October 4, 2011
A successful website needs to be usable, credible and visually appealing. This will generate positive word of mouth, repeat visitors and ultimately a more successful website. The SUPR-Q (Standardized Universal Percentile Rank) measures these concepts in 13 items along with a robust database of 200 websites to know where your scores ranks.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • September 28, 2011
These are three of the most important words for anyone trying to make better decisions with data. For most measures of customer experience there are at least three good places to start to look for meaningful comparables: a prior version, an industry average or a leading competitor.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • September 20, 2011
It's not easy finding and scheduling users to participate in a usability test. It gets a lot easier to observe even difficult to find users when the commitment is just a few minutes in front of their computer.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • September 13, 2011
While overall men tend to make around 4% more than women, the difference is largely explained by age and years of experience. Women make the same or more than men below age 35 but tend to make less for the higher age cohorts.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • September 6, 2011
Completion rates are the fundamental usability metric. They are easy to collect and understand and should be reported with confidence intervals at every stage of development.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • August 30, 2011
The results of the recent UPA Salary survey show 82% of UX professionals use some form of usability testing, 75% perform expert reviews and only 16% have the budget to perform eye-tracking studies. Almost 40% use focus groups and more than two-thirds use prototyping.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • August 23, 2011
The median UX professional salary for 2011 is $90k, up around $5,500 (7%) from 2009. The key factors that drive 40% of salary variation are: years of experience, having a PhD, being a manager and whether you live in the Western or Northeastern US.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • August 16, 2011
There isn't a single silver bullet technique or tool which will uncover all usability problems. Instead, practitioners should quadrangulate using the four corners of usability measurement: user testing, inspection methods, cognitive modeling and standardized questionnaires.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • August 9, 2011
Perhaps it's something about the precision of minutes and seconds that demands greater scrutiny. There's a lot to consider when measuring and analyzing task times in usability tests: among them are how to report the average time, what to do with failed task-attempts, thinking aloud and figuring out how long the task should take.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • August 2, 2011
Heuristic Evaluations and Cognitive Walkthroughs are both usability Inspection Methods that can be used early and often in design to detect many of the problems seen in usability testing. Cognitive Walkthoughs have more of an emphasis on the learnability of a task. Both methods are best performed with multiple evaluators.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • July 26, 2011
If you collect nothing else in a usability test it should be a list of problems encountered by users. It seems so simple yet there is a rich history of how many users you need to test, what constitutes a problem and which method to use.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • July 19, 2011
A usability problem to one usability expert is a feature to another. There is a balance between business interests and user interests but the two aren't mutually exclusive. The discussion should be about short-term revenue at the expense of long term profits--not usability versus revenue.[Read More]
Jeff Sauro • July 12, 2011
The mean response to the likelihood to recommend question predicts the Net Promoter Score very well. Net Promoter Scoring loses about 4% of the response information. It may be more beneficial to report the Net Promoter Score to executives but use the mean for statistical comparisons.[Read More]
Showing the latest 30 posts. Show All 145 Blog Posts
Jeff Sauro is the founding principal of Measuring Usability LLC, a company providing statistics and usability consulting to
Fortune 1000 companies.
He is the author of over
15 journal articles and 3 books on statistics and the user-experience.
More about Jeff...
Distrust in Social Networks: Google+, Twitter, Facebook
5 Examples of Quantifying Qualitative Data
A Brief History of the Magic Number 5 in Usability Testing
Confidence Interval Calculator for a Completion Rate
Why you only need to test with five users (explained)
What five users can tell you that 5000 cannot
The Five Most Influential Papers in Usability
10 Things to Know about Usability Problems
25 Resources for Measuring Usability
Does better usability increase customer loyalty?
How common are usability problems?
8 Ways to Show Design Changes Improved the User Experience
Top 10 Research-Based Usability Findings of 2010
Should you use 5 or 7 point scales?
